Today light conquers darkness
good triumphs over evil
knowledge beats ignorance
as millions of Hindus light lamps
and decorate floors with colored
rice and sand and flour designs
designed to banish the dark side

The caper always goes wrong.
Some dope makes a stupid move
Like shooting the cashier or a copper
Or someone moves too soon and there’s no
Getaway car parked by the curb
Or maybe the dumb mutt follows
The car and the pooch screws you.

Jack Ramey’s novel “Turtle Island: A Dream of Peace” about the founding of the first democracy on the American continent by the Iroquois deals with profound issues of spirituality, war & peace, and the nature of good & evil. It has a special appeal for anyone interested in history, feminism, spirituality, or in protecting the resources of our planet for future generations.

Eavesdropping in Plato’s Café is a collection of lyrical, elegiac, and dramatic poems by Jack Ramey that are at once philosophical and personal, encompassing the broad sweep of history from ancient Greece to post-millennial America.

When I recently visited the Great Law of Peace Center in Syracuse, I was shocked to learn that the sacred Onondaga Lake, which is the setting for the beginning and ending of my historical novel “Turtle Island: A Dream of Peace,” is the most polluted lake in America.

The ancient Forum Romanum: a miracle of marble! / Columns Ionian and Corinthian and statues of gods / And consuls, temples lined inside and out with marble / And mosaic and tiles. Now ruins. Used for centuries / As a quarry to be mined by Bishops and Popes

Particles at vast distances from one another can affect each other’s actions. This phenomenon, called “spooky attraction at a distance,” has implications for a strange mash-up of time and space and alternate universes.

From my home, high on a hill overlooking the Ohio River and downtown Madison, I am able to experience the daily changes in the relationships and moods of the river, which are the inspiration for my collection of river poems.

John Keats, who was born on October 31, 1795, was not well regarded during his brief lifetime, but now, more than two hundred years after his birth, his small output of poems are considered some of the most beautiful and beloved in the English language.

Some say Keats was inspired after seeing the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. Others maintain that it was the Townley Vase that fired his imagination. Neither of these objects, however, contain the wealth of detail that exist in the poem. In it, the poet contemplates the eternal nature of art and the fleeting nature of life.

Poet and spoken-word artist Jack Ramey reads Shelley’s famous poem written after a walk through the woods along the Arno River during a fierce storm. The physical storm and its metaphorical possibilities excited his great poetic imagination, and this poem literally poured out of him.

Poet and spoken-word artist Jack Ramey reads Shelley’s sonnet, which is one of his most famous poems. This fine poem reflects Shelley’s view that tyranny cannot last and that tyrants will always vanish in the end and return to the dust that they came from, as all things do.

“Burnt Almonds” is a parodic, satiric, and science-fictional retelling of the flight of the Enola Gay and the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which was one of the most horrendous examples of mass murder ever inflicted on a civilian population during a time of war. It trumps the atrocities of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Adolf Hitler.

If you are, like me, a fan of historical fiction, and are intrigued by the period of Rome’s inevitable slide into the hegemony of barbarian kingdoms, then you ought to have a look at Michael Curtis Ford’s, “The Fall of Rome: A Novel of a World Lost.”

Moby Dick sits on my shelf like a faithful but jilted lover patiently waiting my return. If you have not time enough in your life to tackle this beast of a book with its long digressions into the history of whaling and the minutiae of the sperm whale, then . . .

I was first introduced to the poems of Wang Wei by my friend and fellow poet, George Kalamaras, when he mentioned that Wang Wei was his favorite Chinese poet in a poetry reading at the Village Lights Bookstore.